The present invention relates to a thermoscan, and more particularly to a thermoscan having voice and infrared communication interface and capable of detecting a patient's heartbeats and illuminating the patient's acoustic meatus to facilitate inspection thereof.
The thermoscan disclosed in the present invention is developed by making improvement to the thermoscan disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/231,543 entitled "A Voice Thermoscan" also filed in the name of the applicant. The U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/231,543 discloses a thermoscan having a main body in which a sensing means, a micro processor, a liquid crystal display, and an electronic erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) are provided. The sensing means senses an infrared temperature at a body temperature point on a patient's eardrum and sends out a corresponding signal that is sampled and digitized by the micro processor and then operated and compared with corrected data stored in the EEPROM. A confirmed temperature value for the sensed infrared temperature is output to a communication interface that includes voice and infrared transmission means. The voice means enables voice indication of the confirmed temperature value and the infrared transmission means converts the temperature value into an approved communication protocol for transmission and then transmits the temperature data to an external microcomputer or a personal computer.
While the thermoscan disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/231,543 is practical for use, it would be even better if the thermoscan is provided with means for illuminating a patient's acoustic meatus to facilitate inspection thereof without the need of fetching another separate illuminating tool. Furthermore, since the thermoscan is now widely used by general consumers to scan body temperature conveniently, it would be more practical for use if it is provided with other functions, such as detecting a user's heartbeats.